Electrician Simulator review: Taking an interest in current affairs

Have you tried to get a tradesperson lately? My plumber keeps cancelling on me. The painter won’t even answer my calls. My little electrical jobs are obviously too small because anyone in the trade who even picks up the phone always says they’ll get back to me later. Yeah right.

So this new sim title sounded like the ideal substitute instead of doing a night course or watching questionable YouTube tutorials. But no, you will not learn to become a mildly competent spark from playing it. Then again, Gran Turismo never taught me to become a racing driver and FIFA (sorry, FC24) never made a professional footballer of me either.

Electrician Simulator is part of that great wave of loosely informative real-life imitators from the sublime (PowerWash Simulator or Farming Simulator) to the ridiculous (Goat Simulator or Street Cleaning Simulator). They exist as brain-calming diversions, like sitting down with relaxing cup of tea to solve a crossword).

In the case of this depiction of the leccy trade, you’ll learn as much about running your business and repairing gadgets as you will about current, amps, voltage and watts. The game functions like a series of logic puzzles without ever fully explaining the underlying concepts of electricity.

On those terms, then, Electrician Simulator offers a diverting few hours of entertainment, albeit an experience tempered by a clumsy interface – at least on Switch, though presumably a mouse makes for a much better selection tool on PC.

You begin the game as a novice tasked with diagnosing wonky switches and unresponsive bulbs. You learn to meticulously pull apart the housing, unscrewing and removing layers as you go. But even these simple jobs are afforded little in the way of tutorials (where does the green wire go again?). Thankfully, forgetting to turn off the fuse at the meter produces no more than a robust controller rumble and buzzing sound when, like me, you inevitably touch a live wire. In real life, however, that might mean a hospital visit or possibly death if you’ve a dicky ticker.

In your side-hustle, people will ask you to repair their busted gizmos (game controllers, smoke alarms, etc), which is a fairly zen affair in which you dismantle the object to its components, test for faults and re-assemble the yoke with parts replaced. It’s hard to go wrong with infinite hints on tap but the economics get a bit ropey, thanks to some outlandish costs ($50 for a new screwdriver?!). So maybe the game doesn’t teach you about running a business after all.

As your prowess and reputation grows, customers will dangle more complicated work in front of you – such as setting up a smart home network – but the jobs adhere to the same basics of wiring you’ve completed several times over.

While all this fiddling about feels relaxing, you will curse the cursor and tiny interface UI many times over (on Switch anyway). Even after adjusting the size and sensitivity and turning on the aiming guide, it’s far too easy to overshoot the mark or be baffled by what you’re looking at. And don’t get me started about why select/interact is mapped to both the ZR and A buttons – the correct choice changes depending on the context.

Electrician Simulator turns on the part of the lizard brain devoted to making pleasurable connections but some of its design decisions have been badly wired and it feels a little too unplugged from reality. And that’s enough shocking puns for this review.